I’ve seen it said that the best way to start building a campaign world is to begin with a richly realised local area and build out from there. It’s pretty good advice – My first campaign suffered because of a lack of attention given to where the players were – And as a worldbuilding strategy it fulfils the following aims:
- Able to build enough to start playing quickly
- Ensures a detailed starting scenario
- Doesn’t sweat the faraway stuff – Reduces work to that which will matter
- The same world can be used multiple times and added to
So it’s a good strategy for new DMs. I say this so you all know where I’m coming from; I see the benefits of that method, and I’m here to offer a different method with different benefits.
But before that, some criticisms of Local-First worldbuilding. It’s sort of setting-agnostic while also baking in quite a lot of assumptions about your world. Take Matt Colville’s Local Area video and accompanying PDF. The questions he asks are geared towards a setting that looks quite similar to his own medieval game: He assumes there’s a government, and that there are Humans, and that the religion is a pantheon that will have certain gods.
That’s not a stunning takedown – He can’t be expected to account for every genre and tone and world-type. But that proves that you need to know at least something about the context you’re working in before you can even ask questions about your starting area. Local-First worldbuilding can sometimes obfuscate that by assuming you’re aiming for The Universal D&D Setting.
In fact sometimes, if you’re a new DM, the people suggesting Local-First will insist you not be ambitious with your first game. “Just play normal D&D to start off with” they say, as if that game can be defined. That’s a community thing though.
My point is: Local-First requires you to know something about your setting on a global scale to be able to zoom in.
My second criticism is this: If you start with a local area in a medieval context, what can the players intuit about your world? They can only know what you’ve decided about the world, which you may be making up on the spot. It might feel like there’s a vast homogenous medieval soup, a medium to adventure through, that may be buffering only at the same rate as the players travel through it. It might feel less real, because things only exist when they’re needed, and there’s less ability to know about “Over there” until the DM has figured out what it’s like there.
My third and final criticism is about tone and theme. If you aren’t careful as a Local-First worldbuilder, you might create stuff that doesn’t completely match in tone, or that don’t make sense when taken together. This is because it gets the causality the wrong way around: In the real world large scale effects and events affect smaller scales, but the reverse isn’t necessarily true. That might not be something you worry about with your game, and that’s totally fine, but if you wanted a pulpy adventure game, or a wistful Ghibli theme, it might help to know more about your world than the homogenous context-soup that Local-First is before you get around to detailing it.
So here’s where we stand on Local-First as a worldbuilding strategy:
- Able to build enough to start playing quickly
- Ensures a detailed starting scenario
- Doesn’t sweat the faraway stuff – Reduces work to that which will matter
- The same world can be used multiple times and added to
- Needs some information about global scale/context
- Can feel less real/connected – Medieval soup
- Difficult to achieve certain themes and genres
We can see that it has its advantages, and if you’re a new DM who just wants to begin playing and is daunted by the amount of stuff you have to write, it certainly helps. But if we want to make worlds that feel like real, connected systems, where information about the whole setting is ready for session 1, there’s at least one other way that preserves the economy of effort and can be done in almost as much time. In a gleeful disregard for symmetry I call it my Top-Down method. Next post will tell you all about it.
Caps and Numbers 